Searcy, Jackie

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ORAL HISTORY OF JACKIE HILDEBRAND SEARCY
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
October 25, 2012
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview has been scheduled through the Oak Ridge Center of Oral History. The date is October 25, 2012. I am Don Hunnicutt in the studio of BBB Communications, LLC., 170 Robertsville Road, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to take an oral history from Mrs. Jackie Searcy about living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. May I call you Jackie?
MRS. SEARCY: You may.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Please give me your full name, your maiden name and as well as your married name, place of birth, and the date.
MRS. SEARCY: Ok, Jackie Lou Hildebrand Searcy. Born November 8, 1935, in Youngstown, Ohio.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Give me your father’s name and place of birth.
MRS. SEARCY: William Hildebrand, William Henry Hildebrand, Sharon, Pennsylvania.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your mother’s name and place of birth.
MRS. SEARCY: Elsie May Burger, B-U-R-G-E-R, in, I think, Sharon, Pennsylvania.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall your father’s, father’s name and where his place of birth is?
MRS. SEARCY: Joseph Hildebrand, Wheatland, Pennsylvania.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about your mother’s maiden name…
MRS. SEARCY: My mother’s maiden…
MR. HUNNICUTT: .…and place of birth?
MRS. SEARCY: .…was Burger. Her mother was Mabel Burger, and she also was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember how they met?
MRS. SEARCY: No, I don’t. My dad played in big bands and I think probably somehow through that because my mother was five years younger, so she wouldn’t have been in school with him.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did they live when they were married?
MRS. SEARCY: Youngstown, Ohio.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type schooling did your father have?
MRS. SEARCY: Daddy went through two years of college at—I can’t remember the name of the college now. It was a small college in Pennsylvania.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about your mother?
MRS. SEARCY: Mother didn’t have college. She graduated from Sharon High School.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Sisters and brothers?
MRS. SEARCY: I have two other sisters. One was born on my first birthday, November 8, 1936. Her name is Jan Santorro, and the youngest one, Karen, was born here Father’s Day, June 16, 1946.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of work did your father do?
MRS. SEARCY: He originally came here from Pennsylvania with—I knew I’d forget this—Stone and Webster as an accountant.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Ok, before he came to Oak Ridge, what type of work did he do?
MRS. SEARCY: He was an accountant with Youngstown Sheet and Steel or Sheet and Tube.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about your mom, did she work?
MRS. SEARCY: She did not work out of the home.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And do you recall what year it was that your father and your family came to Oak Ridge?
MRS. SEARCY: Dad came down here in the early summer of ’43, and worked for a couple months and then came back to Pennsylvania and brought my mother and my sister and I down.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get here?
MRS. SEARCY: In an old blue, navy blue Chevy, and it had about four flat tires on the way down from Pennsylvania, and we got here and came—We were supposed to have a cottage at Norris Dam when we got here. We came in at 10:00 at night, and the cottage was still occupied. The people never left, so we were stuck, and the people at Norris Dam gave us a tent with a wooden bottom on it up on stilts, and we stayed there probably not a week. I don’t really remember now, but it seems several days anyway. We slept in the tent on legs at Norris Dam. My mother was a city lady. She came down in high heels (chuckles). My sister and I were probably six and seven at that point, and we, we didn’t have a clue, I mean, what all that meant. We knew there were daddy long legs in our tent and lizards, and my mother probably wasn’t a happy camper because Daddy left in the morning for work, and we were there all day by ourselves, and we had to walk down a huge hill, her in high heels, down to the Norris Dam.…well, it was some kind of a restaurant, and so she was traipsing up and down the hills in high heels, and we had a ball because it was up in the woods.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you move to from the tent?
MRS. SEARCY: My daddy came home one day and said, “I have found us a place to live in Oak Ridge.” The place turned out to be a double trailer right down where the high school is now…the so called “new high school”. It was in that area, and it was a big double trailer with no running water. They put ice and came around every couple of days and put a big block of ice in the refrigerator, or the icebox, and we went out the back door and down the road to the restroom and the shower at night or in the morning or whenever. I don’t know where she washed clothes. I have no idea, never thought of it until this week.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, when you came to Oak Ridge you were seven?
MRS. SEARCY: I was seven, and my sister was six.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was the first school you attended?
MRS. SEARCY: In Oak Ridge?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. SEARCY: I think it was where Jefferson Junior High is now, or Robertsville. We were there, and we had classes out on the ground while they were still finishing up the building. That’s my recollection, and it must have been September and October because we stayed in the trailer village there until November, and spinal meningitis broke out, and my dad sent us back to Pennsylvania on the train, which we picked up just outside of Elza Gate. We got on the train outside of Elza Gate.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you stand beside the railroad track and…?
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t know how that happened. I just know that Daddy drove us out there. He still had the car and put us on the train. We didn’t go into Knoxville, and he had arranged for a little compartment for the three of us, so that was pretty fancy back then. So we rode all the way up to Cincinnati in the compartment on the L&N train.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how long did you stay out of Oak Ridge before you came back?
MRS. SEARCY: I came back the next spring. We stayed with my dad’s parents in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and I was a sicko. I had tonsils out in February. In March or April, my mother brought me back down to Tennessee and left my sister in school in Pennsylvania, so I came back, and I was the only child until June. And I didn’t go to school because they treated me as if I had (sigh) some kind of a cardiac illness, so they mostly kept me in bed and got me a puppy dog and a duck, and those were my two companions.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, tell me about living in the double-wide trailer. Describe what it looked like inside.
MRS. SEARCY: You know, I was trying to think of that, and all I can remember is there were two couches that let down for sleeping, and I don’t remember a table or chairs or anything else like that. I just know that there were two couches that you could sleep on.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And they would deliver ice? How often did they do that?
MRS. SEARCY: A couple of times a week, and it would just go into a big icebox in the kitchen, and it must have been gas cooking or oil. I don’t know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about if you wanted to use the bathroom or take a shower? What did you do?
MRS. SEARCY: Our mother had to walk us to the bathhouse, which was behind our trailer and not too far from where we lived, but we always had to be escorted, and that’s…When we went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I don’t know if we had something in the house for that or whether somebody took us to the bathhouse, but on shower days and shampoo days, we went to the bathhouse and showered and shampooed, and I screamed a lot because I had curly hair.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall whether or not the trailers in the trailer park at that time, a trailer camp it was called, did they decorate outside and grow flowers or anything like that you recall?
MRS. SEARCY: I do remember some flowers there with some of the people that were there. I do remember that, but I don’t remember any other fancying up. We weren’t there long enough to do that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How long did you live there?
MRS. SEARCY: We were probably there from July, September, probably more like August, September, and October, and we left to go home on the 8th of November, my mother and my sister and I, and I think Daddy stayed in that trailer for a while.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, when you came back to Oak Ridge with your mother and sister…
MRS. SEARCY: No, it was just my mother and I.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …your mother and you?
MRS. SEARCY: We came back in April.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Of what year?
MRS. SEARCY: Sometime early April of ’43. Oh, let’s see, it would have been ’44 by then, yeah, and we went to a flat top on Orchard Lane. It was the first flat top on Orchard Lane at the time, and it was a two bedroom.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me what a flat top looked like in those days.
MRS. SEARCY: That particular flat top had linoleum floors. You walked up about four steps and went in the front door, and our kitchen was on the right. Our living room/dining area was on the left. The Warm Morning heater was in the middle, and the two bedrooms and the bathroom were in a little hall in the back.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And how many people lived in the flat top?
MRS. SEARCY: At that time, it was three of us, and then my sister came down in June, and there were four of us.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how the flat top was heated?
MRS. SEARCY: By the Warm Morning heater and coal.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was the coal stored?
MRS. SEARCY: The coal was down the little boardwalk to the street, and there was a little coal box on the left, and we filled that coal scuttle up and brought it into the house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that some of your chores, to fill the coal?
MRS. SEARCY: You know, I don’t know that it ever was. I can’t remember that I ever did that. I remember that, that Warm Morning heater blew out on a few occasions, and my mother would hang the clean laundry all across the living room, and they would be loaded with soot (chuckles).
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did she hang her clothes outside?
MRS. SEARCY: In the summer but not in the winter, I don’t think.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you recall outside at the clothes’ lines? Did neighbors gather and talk at the clothes’ lines, the ladies?
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t have a clue because there was a little play, a play yard, right up next to our flat top between our flat top and the little road that went up to the water tower, and there was a big water tower on Orchard Lane and a reservoir, and there was another flat top on the other side of that road, so we weren’t all that close right there, but we did have a playground to play on.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How old were you when you lived in the flat top?
MRS. SEARCY: Eight.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What school did you attend?
MRS. SEARCY: Cedar Hill, and it was brand new at that time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the dress code for girls in those days to go to school.
MRS. SEARCY: It was dresses, dresses period, no pants, no long pants, dresses with puffy sleeves and sweaters.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember any of your teachers when you went to Cedar Hill?
MRS. SEARCY: I had Ms. Allen in the fourth grade and Ms. Keys in the third grade and Ms. Headrick in the fifth and Ms. Frasier in the sixth.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about Cedar Hill School? How was it?
MRS. SEARCY: It was great. The teachers were great there. We even had a principal that was great, Mr. Dodd who recently died in the last 10 years, and I think all of us thought it was a wonderful place to be. We had wonderful, you know, summertime.
It was like camp, running down play camp and play ball, softball, basketball, up and down the slides. I learned to play games, and we were riding our bicycles everywhere by then too.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember some of the classes that you took?
MRS. SEARCY: At Cedar Hill?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. SEARCY: Well, we had Art classes and Music classes. Those were the two different classes where we left to go to another room, otherwise we stayed in our home rooms where our teacher was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When your mother would have to go to the grocery store to shop, where did she go, and how did she get there?
MRS. SEARCY: I think on the bus like most other mothers did at that time because we didn’t have a car any more. My dad had sold our car, and we got on the bus and came downtown, either down to Jackson Square or over to Pine Valley, and that’s where we shopped.
MR. HUNNICUTT: At this time, what type of job did your father have?
MRS. SEARCY: I think he was still working for Stone and Webster at that point as an accountant, and he did that for several years and then moved on to, well it wasn’t K-25, and I can’t remember who it was, but one of the other big companies there, and then he went on to K-25 and worked there for 25 years and retired from K-25.
MR. HUNNICUTT: As an accountant?
MRS. SEARCY: No, he was head of Materials and...had something to do with Materials…before that it was Personnel. He was in Personnel, but he retired from there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your mother work?
MRS. SEARCY: No, not out of the home. By then we had another baby sister, so she took care of the baby sister at home while we were in elementary school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever hear your father talk anything about his job?
MRS. SEARCY: No, he never did. We never really knew what he did except that he worked late nights sometimes, and I’m not sure the day that the bomb went off and everybody found out what they had been working on. I don’t know whether he was home that day or at work.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you like school? Did you like going to school?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, I loved it. I loved it. I did not want to go back to Pennsylvania to the schools there. Our schools were bright and cheerful, and those schools were big, huge, brick things that were dark looking.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After Cedar Hill School, what was the other school you attended?
MRS. SEARCY: Jefferson Junior High at Robertsville.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe to me that school. How did it look?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, the part that we were in at that point as seventh and eighth graders was bright and cheerful and new, pretty much like Cedar Hill. The ninth graders were in the big, red, brick building, as I recall. At least that’s where my ninth grade classes were, and we had good teachers, and we had Home Ec. and Gym and Music and all that. We had wonderful things.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So the building that you were in, was that the old Robertsville School?
MRS. SEARCY: It was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall having escape tubes that came out of the school?
MRS. SEARCY: In the ninth grade, when we went to the brick building, they had the tubes, and I think at some point we all got to slide down those tubes for a fire drill, and that was fun.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of classes do you remember taking at Robertsville School…I mean at Jefferson at Robertsville.
MRS. SEARCY: At Jefferson...Well, seventh and eighth grade it was the usual Math and Science and English and all that, and when we got to ninth grade we took foreign languages and more Math, and I don’t remember what the sciences were there but more English.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you still enjoy going to school?
MRS. SEARCY: Yeah, I wasn’t a really great student because I missed a lot of school as a kid, missed a lot of basic stuff, so it was hard for me, but I studied pretty hard.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get to school?
MRS. SEARCY: On a school bus. Yeah, I remember the school buses. Always, that’s how we got there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember any of your favorite teachers in junior high?
MRS. SEARCY: No, I don’t remember their names.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After junior high, at the old Robertsville School, where did you attend high school?
MRS. SEARCY: At the High School, well, what was then the new high school down off of the [Oak Ridge] Turnpike there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about that school. How did you like going to the High School?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, I liked it. It was bigger. It was a little more imposing than Robertsville had been, but, you know, we found our way around, found our lockers, figured out how to get where we were supposed to be. It was a lot bigger school than we had been used to, and we had good teachers there too and lots to do, lots of different clubs and things.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you join certain things?
MRS. SEARCY: Yeah, I did. I was in—I was on the annual committee and the newspaper for a couple years, and I was in Ms. Massey’s class, some of her classes. She was the theater person there. I wasn’t in any of the music. I wish I had been, but I wasn’t, and they offered a lot, and I was mostly intramurals. I played basketball and ran some track and swam. There was a swimming pool across the road. That was before we had indoor pools in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about running track from a girl’s standpoint.
MRS. SEARCY: I wasn’t very good. I fell and got gravels in my knee, and they’re still there (chuckles), but it was fun. It was fun.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you go to any dances or things of that nature?
MRS. SEARCY: All the dances that came around that I can imagine, that I got a date to or could ask a date to.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Talking about the swimming pool by the high school, what was that like?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, before it became the swimming pool, while we were living in the trailer camp, my sister went over to visit it as it was a fishing camp, and we had another little girl with us, and we went over there—we weren’t supposed to, but we did—and found a row boat down on the front where the little... there was a cabin, and there was a row boat pulled up with one oar in it, and the three of us got in that row boat and pushed off, and none of us could swim, and we paddled out a little bit and then got scared and decided we had better paddle ourselves back real quick before we got turned over. Once we got out of the row boat, and my sister and I went up and looked in the cabin. The doors were locked, but there was a window open, so one of us, and I don’t know who it was, pushed the other one in to go in and take a look around the cabin, and we did that, and I think my sister got a bloody nose out of that deal, and so we thought we’d better get back home before our mother found out that we had disappeared. And when I think back on it now years later, we could have drowned, and she never would have known it. She didn’t know what we did. We just explored a lot, and so then—I’m sorry, they built the high school there, and there was a huge, huge oak tree outside of the front of the gym there, and that oak tree had been there, of course, since we were really little running around playing up there. That’s one of the things I remember about that, and I know I got off on the swimming pool. We loved the swimming pool. That’s where we spent all of our summers.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Kind of describe the swimming pool. How big was it? Did they have places to change clothes?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, of course. They had changing rooms for men and women, and at one time, at its biggest, the pool had a 100 meter straightaway on it, which was a long way, but then they had a lot of meets there. It was great for 100 meter swims or 400 meter swims, and my sister and I were members of the very first swim team that they had, and I couldn’t tell you what the year was, but at the time there were three girls on that team, and I don’t know how many boys. We were all in, before junior high. We were all elementary school kids, and my sister and I continued to swim until we graduated high school, on that team. It was a good team too.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the mud in Oak Ridge?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, yeah. When we came through Elza Gate in my dad’s car that first time, I remembered seeing commodes and sinks floating in mud on the right hand side as we came through Elza Gate. All that was just floating in mud, and the trailer camp had lots of mud, and I don’t remember how my mother handled it or how we handled it. I think we must have had, I don’t know, something to get to the road, maybe pieces of board or something so we wouldn’t sink in the mud.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well now, in high school, did you date much?
MRS. SEARCY: Yeah. I did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you go on your dates?
MRS. SEARCY: To the movies mostly or dancing. There was a place outside Elza Gate down there. It was a steak house, and we did that in the summer, and I don’t remember the name of it anymore, but it was a lot of fun. Everybody kind of met there at night. If you could drive a car or get a ride, that’s where we went, and sometimes we went swimming at the rock quarry, and surely you knew where that was (laughter).
MR. HUNNICUTT: You’ll have to tell me where the rock quarry was.
MRS. SEARCY: I’m not sure how to get there anymore, but we would go dancing, and then we would decide to go swimming, so then we would go home and quietly go out and get our swim suits off the back, off the line in the back yard, and I don’t remember where we would put them on. Then we went swimming at the rock quarry after that, and then we’d come in around midnight. I think I must have been in high school, or my mother wouldn’t have let me out that late.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were your parents strict parents?
MRS. SEARCY: No, well they were strict enough. They didn’t like us out after midnight, and they liked to know where we were. Except for those occasions where we snuck off and went swimming late, they pretty much knew where we were all the time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you feel safe…
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …growing up here as a child?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, absolutely I did. I did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What gave you that type of a feeling?
MRS. SEARCY: The fact that we were all closed in there for so long, and we didn’t have to lock doors, and in particular where we lived in the flat top at first, there were mounted police riding around there all night long. I guess it was military police, but they were up there all night, and when my dad wasn’t home, we weren’t afraid. I doubt seriously my mother locked the door.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did you do after you graduated from high school?
MRS. SEARCY: I worked a year at Loveman’s down in Jackson Square, and then I went to college when my other sister graduated, and we went to college the same year at Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let me ask you a little bit about Loveman’s. What was Loveman’s?
MRS. SEARCY: It was a department store. It was a nice department store for Oak Ridge at that time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And where in Jackson Square was that located?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, it was facing the football field I guess, that part of town, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What were your job duties?
MRS. SEARCY: I started out being the Easter bunny one year (laughter). That was a hot job. Yep, that was fun because little kids were fun, and for my break time I would go sit in the dressing room and put my feet up and eat chocolate jelly beans (laughter), and after that I worked downstairs in linens and gift wrapping and handbags. I just worked around the store in different departments. It was fun.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember back when nylons were very scarce?
MRS. SEARCY: No, because I was too young to be wearing them then, and I think when I was old enough to wear them I didn’t want to wear them. I was good with bobby socks and saddle oxfords.
MR. HUNNICUTT: In the Jackson Square area, what do you recall as some of the other stores?
MRS. SEARCY: Mostly the drug store on the first corner down there that’s now turned into a restaurant, and there was a place next door to that, that sold hot doughnuts that we all loved to go to, and then there was the men’s store and the movie theater and a grocery store. And, I know there was a dime store on the other side to the left of Loveman’s. That must have been McCrorey’s Five and Ten, and we used to go there and get a huge bag of animal crackers for the movies, didn’t cost more than about 15 cents.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How often did you go to the movies?
MRS. SEARCY: Every week.
MR. HUNNICUTT: There in Jackson Square?
MRS. SEARCY: At least, yeah at least once a week, we went to the Center Theater to see cops and robbers, and the Black Whip, whoever, and the news, news reels.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how much it cost to get into the theater?
MRS. SEARCY: About a dime. I thought it was a dime.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about Coca-Cola?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, they couldn’t have been more than a nickel. It was wonderful.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you think that—Let’s talk about the buses in Oak Ridge a little bit. Now you rode the buses to and from school.
MRS. SEARCY: Everywhere, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the bus fare. Was there a cost to ride the bus?
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t think initially there was in the first few years, but then they started charging about a dime to ride the bus, and I know you could get transfers from there to wherever else you needed to go, but for school, when we were at the high school, I don’t think we, I don’t remember having to pay. We may have, but I don’t remember. A lot of things escape me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you talk about transfer, how did that work?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, you got a paper transfer, and if you needed to catch the bus say from downtown you got off in town and then could transfer out to Elm Grove or to the other end of town. They gave you a paper transfer, and we may have had to do that to go to school. I don’t know, in high school. We didn’t in junior high, but we may have in high school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have an automobile at that time? Did your parents have an automobile?
MRS. SEARCY: They got a car when I was in high school, about the time I was taking driving lessons. It was a big, old Hudson Hornet, I think. It was a huge thing. It was like a boat, and my dad let me drive it downtown to the grocery store one Friday night before a ball game (sigh), and I pulled in to park it and sideswiped somebody’s Cadillac, and he almost had a stroke (chuckles). I don’t think I took the paint off the Cadillac, but anyway he took over driving home.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you take driving lessons?
MRS. SEARCY: I took it from Mr…at the high school on our lunch hour…I want to say from Mr. Naft, but I don’t think that was the name—Earl somebody. Anyway, he was a teacher at the high school, and he was our driving teacher, and one of us would sit in the back seat and eat lunch, and the other one would take a driving lesson.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember standing in lines a lot during shopping?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, yeah everybody stood in lines, and my mother would take us along so we could stand in one line, and she could stand in another if there were meat lines and lines to get soap and things like that. Yeah, we did that and had those little coupons.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Ration coupons?
MRS. SEARCY: Ration coupons, yeah. You had your little ration tickets.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, we’re spinning back a little bit. You lived—Where did you live after you, while you were going to the high school?
MRS. SEARCY: At 115 Orchard Lane. We always stayed on Orchard Lane. We just moved up, and we were on top, we were on top of the hill when we were in the flat top, and that was Cedar Hill mostly. Then we moved down to 115 Orchard Lane, which was a cemesto, a three bedroom cemesto, C house, and we lived there until I got married.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe the C house. How was it?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, when you came in our front door into the little front hall, if you turned right you went to the back of the house with one bathroom and three bedrooms, and if you turned left you went into the living room/dining area. The living room had a fireplace, a brick fireplace, and then if you turned left out of the living room you were in the kitchen and then left out of the kitchen you were in the little utility room with the big coal bin and coal furnace. Those were the days before my mother had an automatic washer and dryer, and I don’t remember where that thing went, but when we got it, it was one of those front loaders, and everybody sat around and watched it (laughter).
MR. HUNNICUTT: You didn’t put a cat in there and watch it…
MRS. SEARCY: No, I didn’t put cats...
MR. HUNNICUTT: … go around did you?
MRS. SEARCY: …in the front loader. We thought about putting the baby sister in there one time, but we didn’t.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You’ve caught me off guard on that one.
MRS. SEARCY: I’m sorry. (Laughter)
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did they…how did you get the coal? Did they deliver the coal to the houses?
MRS. SEARCY: They delivered the coal. It seemed like it came, maybe it came once a month or twice a month. I don’t remember. I don’t remember that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, let’s spin forward a little bit more about after graduation you told me you attended college and go a little further into that.
MRS. SEARCY: I didn’t like it. It was a girls’ school. My sister and I, neither one of us really liked it. I stayed out the year. She left at midyear, and I stayed and then I decided to go to work with Delta Airlines, and I thought that’s what I wanted to do because my friend did it, so she talked me into it. But, in the meantime, I came back to Oak Ridge and taught swimming at the swimming pool in the summer to make a little money and taught little kids how to swim and some older women, and I did that when I started dating Jay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you work while you were going to high school any?
MRS. SEARCY: I can’t remember. I think I worked on weekends in gift wrapping at Loveman’s while I was in high school. Yeah, that’s what I did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you remember—You talked about dropping the atomic bomb. Tell me what you remember about that when that happened?
MRS. SEARCY: You know, my parents must have been very, kind of kept that quiet because I didn’t know much about that until a little bit later. I wondered why people were jumping around in the streets, and my dad wasn’t home when we found out about it. He was at work, and I guess we thought it was wonderful.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall your father ever talking about…
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …anything about the bomb after it was announced?
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t remember that. I don’t know, but he and mother probably discussed it, but I don’t remember it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the gate opening ceremonies that happened in March of 1949 when they opened the gates? Did you attend that?
MRS. SEARCY: Well…my sister and I went down; we walked down to Jackson Square to see the parade. We did not ride our bicycles clear down to Elza Gate. Our parents probably wouldn’t have allowed that, but we did come downtown to watch the parade and saw all the people, you know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall some of the people in the parade?
MRS. SEARCY: I recall seeing the “movie stars” that were there riding through town, the guy on the horse and then our bands, the junior high band, the majorettes, and our high school band and probably Clinton’s band was there too. I don’t know, but that was a fun day. We had a good time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there a lot of people there?
MRS. SEARCY: There were a lot of people so thick you couldn’t stir them with a stick. Now that was a great time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you go to any of the other events during the gate opening?
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t think so.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever visit the Atomic Museum?
MRS. SEARCY: You know, I visited something, and I was thinking the museum wasn’t always where it is now. Was it?
MR. HUNNICUTT: No.
MRS. SEARCY: Because I thought I visited it somewhere else, but I don’t remember. I was thinking it was down near the railroad on the way to Elza Gate. There was a railroad coming up there, and I remember being down there for some big thing that opened. That was probably the opening of it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That was the first viewing…
MRS. SEARCY: Right.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …of the museum in that warehouse.
MRS. SEARCY: Ok.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Then later it moved to Jefferson Circle in the old cafeteria.
MRS. SEARCY: Right. Well, it wasn’t there, so it was down there on that railroad side somewhere near Elza Gate.
MR. HUNNICUTT: American Museum of Atomic Energy opened the same weekend the parade and gate opening ceremonies.
MRS. SEARCY: Right, and I don’t know how we got down there. Somebody must have taken us in a car.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember any other special events in Oak Ridge that you went to?
MRS. SEARCY: Yeah, I remember when Dorothy Lamour came to Oak Ridge at one time with her husband, and somebody else was with them, but I remember going to a party here somewhere in this area where they were, and I was in high school then at that point, and I think I came with my swimming coach. He invited us along, and that was kind of fun. To me she was a bigger deal than who they’d had for the opening of the gates.
MR. HUNNICUTT: This area you’re referring to Grove Center shopping area.
MRS. SEARCY: The Grove Center.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Maybe the Oak Terrace?
MRS. SEARCY: It was the Oak Terrace ballroom, yeah. Thank you for reminding me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did she do?
MRS. SEARCY: PR, I guess. She was just there for whatever for that particular weekend, and she was glamorous, and everybody enjoyed meeting her and looking at her, I guess. She was a movie star.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you meet your husband?
MRS. SEARCY: In high school. I just didn’t date him. He dated everyone I knew (laughter). I was busy dating other people, and he wasn’t tall enough yet. In high heels at his prom he asked me to dance, and I was about…he was about the same height as I was, but he was a really great dancer, so I didn’t care.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type music did you listen to in those days?
MRS. SEARCY: Bop, black music, really good black music. We went over to Chilhowee Park to watch the black kids dance when we could. We would sit up in the balconies, and they would get to dance, and I think he took me to one of those, and somebody else took me to one, and that was a great date, and we learned some good steps.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, now you’ve met your husband in high school, and you started dating.
MRS. SEARCY: We didn’t date until he was a junior in college, I think.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, when did you get married, and where did you get married?
MRS. SEARCY: We got married here in Oak Ridge at Presbyterian Church in 1956.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And where did you first live?
MRS. SEARCY: With him?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. SEARCY: Johnson City, Tennessee, and then we didn’t live long there. We moved over to Kingsport because he was working at the Kingsport Times News and going to school full-time at East Tennessee, and so we had our first child there in Kingsport in ’57 and the second one in ’58, and then we moved on down to Chattanooga and lived there 13 years.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And then from Chattanooga?
MRS. SEARCY: To New York for four years and in the Philadelphia area for 28 years.
MR. HUNNICUTT: This was due to your husband’s profession?
MRS. SEARCY: Um-hum.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you work any while you were living in these different places?
MRS. SEARCY: I worked part-time in Chattanooga at Loveman’s again, but I worked part-time while my kids were in school because I carted them around a lot back and forth to football games and things, and then when we moved to New York, I think I worked up there at JC Penney at one time for a while, and then when we moved to the Philadelphia area the boys came back down here to school, and I went to nursing school. When I turned 40, I went to nursing school and became an LPN in one year and then started working and started going back to college and taking college courses.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What is your children’s name?
MRS. SEARCY: Mike and Mark. Mike is the oldest. He is in Dandridge. Mark lives outside of Columbus, Ohio in a little town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall their dress code versus your dress code when you went through school like how different it was, or was it different?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, their dress code was, I guess, mostly Levi’s, but they were also in the polyester generation, and they wore things that they look back on now and couldn’t imagine wearing, but they wore a lot of polyester back then.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you think the Oak Ridge school system was a good, great, or…so-so?
MRS. SEARCY: Excellent school system when we were in it. Of course, we didn’t realize it until we left here and went to different schools, and then we realized what a gift we had, had, and I don’t know whether we ever told our parents how glad we were that they brought us here because, you know, you just don’t think of it, I guess, and now that they’re gone I wish that I had been able to tell them that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you ever relate your stories to your children about Oak Ridge?
MRS. SEARCY: Yeah, they get sick of it sometimes (laughter). They do, but our children did a lot of growing up here too in the summers with their grandparents and when we would come to visit, and they had really dear friends that they met and kept for life up around Cedar Hill. They spent their summers playing at Cedar Hill too, and they realize what a good town this was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I’m going to mention some points of interest in Oak Ridge, and tell me what you remember about them…The Oak Terrace.
MRS. SEARCY: Going there to dance, having a wedding reception there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about the Snow White Drive-In?
MRS. SEARCY: Around and around, lots of hamburgers and lots of chili and tamales with onions after school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about the Skyway Drive-In?
MRS. SEARCY: I didn’t get to go there very often.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now that’s a drive-in theater.
MRS. SEARCY: I know. I guess we went some, but I don’t remember going with too terribly many dates out at the Skyway.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Of course, we mentioned the swimming pool. What about bowling? Did you..?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, yeah. My sister and I, my one sister and I, grew up at that bowling alley down in Jackson Square because we knew the Tuckers who ran it, and their daughter was a good friend of ours, and we actually set pins too but not when there were leagues going on. We set pins for one another. It was too dangerous for girls back then, but it was fun. We actually won—We had a little team that actually won a National Junior Bowling Congress something or other. We still have our little bowling balls, and I don’t know what you do with those, pass them down to your grandkids (laughter)?
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about horseback riding or anything like that?
MRS. SEARCY: I didn’t horseback ride. The only horse I ever got on ran off with me, and I fell off.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you can remember that you’d like to talk about?
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t know. I grew up in the Oak Ridge swimming pool actually. That’s where we had most of our great fun, days and nights. I worked there, and we had lots of friends there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I’ve always heard that the water was cold. Is that true?
MRS. SEARCY: Colder than blue blazes. It is just spring fed, cold water, and it didn’t bother me when I was young, but it bothers me now, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, it’s been a pleasure to interview you.
MRS. SEARCY: Thank you.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And I believe your oral history will be a tribute to the history of Oak Ridge.
MRS. SEARCY: Do you?
MR. HUNNICUTT: And I thank you very much.
MRS. SEARCY: Thank you. I appreciated it.
[End of Interview]

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ORAL HISTORY OF JACKIE HILDEBRAND SEARCY
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
October 25, 2012
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview has been scheduled through the Oak Ridge Center of Oral History. The date is October 25, 2012. I am Don Hunnicutt in the studio of BBB Communications, LLC., 170 Robertsville Road, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to take an oral history from Mrs. Jackie Searcy about living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. May I call you Jackie?
MRS. SEARCY: You may.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Please give me your full name, your maiden name and as well as your married name, place of birth, and the date.
MRS. SEARCY: Ok, Jackie Lou Hildebrand Searcy. Born November 8, 1935, in Youngstown, Ohio.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Give me your father’s name and place of birth.
MRS. SEARCY: William Hildebrand, William Henry Hildebrand, Sharon, Pennsylvania.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your mother’s name and place of birth.
MRS. SEARCY: Elsie May Burger, B-U-R-G-E-R, in, I think, Sharon, Pennsylvania.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall your father’s, father’s name and where his place of birth is?
MRS. SEARCY: Joseph Hildebrand, Wheatland, Pennsylvania.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about your mother’s maiden name…
MRS. SEARCY: My mother’s maiden…
MR. HUNNICUTT: .…and place of birth?
MRS. SEARCY: .…was Burger. Her mother was Mabel Burger, and she also was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember how they met?
MRS. SEARCY: No, I don’t. My dad played in big bands and I think probably somehow through that because my mother was five years younger, so she wouldn’t have been in school with him.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did they live when they were married?
MRS. SEARCY: Youngstown, Ohio.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type schooling did your father have?
MRS. SEARCY: Daddy went through two years of college at—I can’t remember the name of the college now. It was a small college in Pennsylvania.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about your mother?
MRS. SEARCY: Mother didn’t have college. She graduated from Sharon High School.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Sisters and brothers?
MRS. SEARCY: I have two other sisters. One was born on my first birthday, November 8, 1936. Her name is Jan Santorro, and the youngest one, Karen, was born here Father’s Day, June 16, 1946.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of work did your father do?
MRS. SEARCY: He originally came here from Pennsylvania with—I knew I’d forget this—Stone and Webster as an accountant.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Ok, before he came to Oak Ridge, what type of work did he do?
MRS. SEARCY: He was an accountant with Youngstown Sheet and Steel or Sheet and Tube.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about your mom, did she work?
MRS. SEARCY: She did not work out of the home.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And do you recall what year it was that your father and your family came to Oak Ridge?
MRS. SEARCY: Dad came down here in the early summer of ’43, and worked for a couple months and then came back to Pennsylvania and brought my mother and my sister and I down.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get here?
MRS. SEARCY: In an old blue, navy blue Chevy, and it had about four flat tires on the way down from Pennsylvania, and we got here and came—We were supposed to have a cottage at Norris Dam when we got here. We came in at 10:00 at night, and the cottage was still occupied. The people never left, so we were stuck, and the people at Norris Dam gave us a tent with a wooden bottom on it up on stilts, and we stayed there probably not a week. I don’t really remember now, but it seems several days anyway. We slept in the tent on legs at Norris Dam. My mother was a city lady. She came down in high heels (chuckles). My sister and I were probably six and seven at that point, and we, we didn’t have a clue, I mean, what all that meant. We knew there were daddy long legs in our tent and lizards, and my mother probably wasn’t a happy camper because Daddy left in the morning for work, and we were there all day by ourselves, and we had to walk down a huge hill, her in high heels, down to the Norris Dam.…well, it was some kind of a restaurant, and so she was traipsing up and down the hills in high heels, and we had a ball because it was up in the woods.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you move to from the tent?
MRS. SEARCY: My daddy came home one day and said, “I have found us a place to live in Oak Ridge.” The place turned out to be a double trailer right down where the high school is now…the so called “new high school”. It was in that area, and it was a big double trailer with no running water. They put ice and came around every couple of days and put a big block of ice in the refrigerator, or the icebox, and we went out the back door and down the road to the restroom and the shower at night or in the morning or whenever. I don’t know where she washed clothes. I have no idea, never thought of it until this week.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, when you came to Oak Ridge you were seven?
MRS. SEARCY: I was seven, and my sister was six.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was the first school you attended?
MRS. SEARCY: In Oak Ridge?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. SEARCY: I think it was where Jefferson Junior High is now, or Robertsville. We were there, and we had classes out on the ground while they were still finishing up the building. That’s my recollection, and it must have been September and October because we stayed in the trailer village there until November, and spinal meningitis broke out, and my dad sent us back to Pennsylvania on the train, which we picked up just outside of Elza Gate. We got on the train outside of Elza Gate.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you stand beside the railroad track and…?
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t know how that happened. I just know that Daddy drove us out there. He still had the car and put us on the train. We didn’t go into Knoxville, and he had arranged for a little compartment for the three of us, so that was pretty fancy back then. So we rode all the way up to Cincinnati in the compartment on the L&N train.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how long did you stay out of Oak Ridge before you came back?
MRS. SEARCY: I came back the next spring. We stayed with my dad’s parents in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and I was a sicko. I had tonsils out in February. In March or April, my mother brought me back down to Tennessee and left my sister in school in Pennsylvania, so I came back, and I was the only child until June. And I didn’t go to school because they treated me as if I had (sigh) some kind of a cardiac illness, so they mostly kept me in bed and got me a puppy dog and a duck, and those were my two companions.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, tell me about living in the double-wide trailer. Describe what it looked like inside.
MRS. SEARCY: You know, I was trying to think of that, and all I can remember is there were two couches that let down for sleeping, and I don’t remember a table or chairs or anything else like that. I just know that there were two couches that you could sleep on.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And they would deliver ice? How often did they do that?
MRS. SEARCY: A couple of times a week, and it would just go into a big icebox in the kitchen, and it must have been gas cooking or oil. I don’t know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about if you wanted to use the bathroom or take a shower? What did you do?
MRS. SEARCY: Our mother had to walk us to the bathhouse, which was behind our trailer and not too far from where we lived, but we always had to be escorted, and that’s…When we went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I don’t know if we had something in the house for that or whether somebody took us to the bathhouse, but on shower days and shampoo days, we went to the bathhouse and showered and shampooed, and I screamed a lot because I had curly hair.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall whether or not the trailers in the trailer park at that time, a trailer camp it was called, did they decorate outside and grow flowers or anything like that you recall?
MRS. SEARCY: I do remember some flowers there with some of the people that were there. I do remember that, but I don’t remember any other fancying up. We weren’t there long enough to do that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How long did you live there?
MRS. SEARCY: We were probably there from July, September, probably more like August, September, and October, and we left to go home on the 8th of November, my mother and my sister and I, and I think Daddy stayed in that trailer for a while.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, when you came back to Oak Ridge with your mother and sister…
MRS. SEARCY: No, it was just my mother and I.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …your mother and you?
MRS. SEARCY: We came back in April.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Of what year?
MRS. SEARCY: Sometime early April of ’43. Oh, let’s see, it would have been ’44 by then, yeah, and we went to a flat top on Orchard Lane. It was the first flat top on Orchard Lane at the time, and it was a two bedroom.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me what a flat top looked like in those days.
MRS. SEARCY: That particular flat top had linoleum floors. You walked up about four steps and went in the front door, and our kitchen was on the right. Our living room/dining area was on the left. The Warm Morning heater was in the middle, and the two bedrooms and the bathroom were in a little hall in the back.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And how many people lived in the flat top?
MRS. SEARCY: At that time, it was three of us, and then my sister came down in June, and there were four of us.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how the flat top was heated?
MRS. SEARCY: By the Warm Morning heater and coal.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was the coal stored?
MRS. SEARCY: The coal was down the little boardwalk to the street, and there was a little coal box on the left, and we filled that coal scuttle up and brought it into the house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was that some of your chores, to fill the coal?
MRS. SEARCY: You know, I don’t know that it ever was. I can’t remember that I ever did that. I remember that, that Warm Morning heater blew out on a few occasions, and my mother would hang the clean laundry all across the living room, and they would be loaded with soot (chuckles).
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did she hang her clothes outside?
MRS. SEARCY: In the summer but not in the winter, I don’t think.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you recall outside at the clothes’ lines? Did neighbors gather and talk at the clothes’ lines, the ladies?
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t have a clue because there was a little play, a play yard, right up next to our flat top between our flat top and the little road that went up to the water tower, and there was a big water tower on Orchard Lane and a reservoir, and there was another flat top on the other side of that road, so we weren’t all that close right there, but we did have a playground to play on.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How old were you when you lived in the flat top?
MRS. SEARCY: Eight.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What school did you attend?
MRS. SEARCY: Cedar Hill, and it was brand new at that time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the dress code for girls in those days to go to school.
MRS. SEARCY: It was dresses, dresses period, no pants, no long pants, dresses with puffy sleeves and sweaters.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember any of your teachers when you went to Cedar Hill?
MRS. SEARCY: I had Ms. Allen in the fourth grade and Ms. Keys in the third grade and Ms. Headrick in the fifth and Ms. Frasier in the sixth.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about Cedar Hill School? How was it?
MRS. SEARCY: It was great. The teachers were great there. We even had a principal that was great, Mr. Dodd who recently died in the last 10 years, and I think all of us thought it was a wonderful place to be. We had wonderful, you know, summertime.
It was like camp, running down play camp and play ball, softball, basketball, up and down the slides. I learned to play games, and we were riding our bicycles everywhere by then too.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember some of the classes that you took?
MRS. SEARCY: At Cedar Hill?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. SEARCY: Well, we had Art classes and Music classes. Those were the two different classes where we left to go to another room, otherwise we stayed in our home rooms where our teacher was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When your mother would have to go to the grocery store to shop, where did she go, and how did she get there?
MRS. SEARCY: I think on the bus like most other mothers did at that time because we didn’t have a car any more. My dad had sold our car, and we got on the bus and came downtown, either down to Jackson Square or over to Pine Valley, and that’s where we shopped.
MR. HUNNICUTT: At this time, what type of job did your father have?
MRS. SEARCY: I think he was still working for Stone and Webster at that point as an accountant, and he did that for several years and then moved on to, well it wasn’t K-25, and I can’t remember who it was, but one of the other big companies there, and then he went on to K-25 and worked there for 25 years and retired from K-25.
MR. HUNNICUTT: As an accountant?
MRS. SEARCY: No, he was head of Materials and...had something to do with Materials…before that it was Personnel. He was in Personnel, but he retired from there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your mother work?
MRS. SEARCY: No, not out of the home. By then we had another baby sister, so she took care of the baby sister at home while we were in elementary school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever hear your father talk anything about his job?
MRS. SEARCY: No, he never did. We never really knew what he did except that he worked late nights sometimes, and I’m not sure the day that the bomb went off and everybody found out what they had been working on. I don’t know whether he was home that day or at work.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you like school? Did you like going to school?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, I loved it. I loved it. I did not want to go back to Pennsylvania to the schools there. Our schools were bright and cheerful, and those schools were big, huge, brick things that were dark looking.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After Cedar Hill School, what was the other school you attended?
MRS. SEARCY: Jefferson Junior High at Robertsville.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe to me that school. How did it look?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, the part that we were in at that point as seventh and eighth graders was bright and cheerful and new, pretty much like Cedar Hill. The ninth graders were in the big, red, brick building, as I recall. At least that’s where my ninth grade classes were, and we had good teachers, and we had Home Ec. and Gym and Music and all that. We had wonderful things.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So the building that you were in, was that the old Robertsville School?
MRS. SEARCY: It was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall having escape tubes that came out of the school?
MRS. SEARCY: In the ninth grade, when we went to the brick building, they had the tubes, and I think at some point we all got to slide down those tubes for a fire drill, and that was fun.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of classes do you remember taking at Robertsville School…I mean at Jefferson at Robertsville.
MRS. SEARCY: At Jefferson...Well, seventh and eighth grade it was the usual Math and Science and English and all that, and when we got to ninth grade we took foreign languages and more Math, and I don’t remember what the sciences were there but more English.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you still enjoy going to school?
MRS. SEARCY: Yeah, I wasn’t a really great student because I missed a lot of school as a kid, missed a lot of basic stuff, so it was hard for me, but I studied pretty hard.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get to school?
MRS. SEARCY: On a school bus. Yeah, I remember the school buses. Always, that’s how we got there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember any of your favorite teachers in junior high?
MRS. SEARCY: No, I don’t remember their names.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After junior high, at the old Robertsville School, where did you attend high school?
MRS. SEARCY: At the High School, well, what was then the new high school down off of the [Oak Ridge] Turnpike there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about that school. How did you like going to the High School?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, I liked it. It was bigger. It was a little more imposing than Robertsville had been, but, you know, we found our way around, found our lockers, figured out how to get where we were supposed to be. It was a lot bigger school than we had been used to, and we had good teachers there too and lots to do, lots of different clubs and things.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you join certain things?
MRS. SEARCY: Yeah, I did. I was in—I was on the annual committee and the newspaper for a couple years, and I was in Ms. Massey’s class, some of her classes. She was the theater person there. I wasn’t in any of the music. I wish I had been, but I wasn’t, and they offered a lot, and I was mostly intramurals. I played basketball and ran some track and swam. There was a swimming pool across the road. That was before we had indoor pools in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about running track from a girl’s standpoint.
MRS. SEARCY: I wasn’t very good. I fell and got gravels in my knee, and they’re still there (chuckles), but it was fun. It was fun.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you go to any dances or things of that nature?
MRS. SEARCY: All the dances that came around that I can imagine, that I got a date to or could ask a date to.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Talking about the swimming pool by the high school, what was that like?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, before it became the swimming pool, while we were living in the trailer camp, my sister went over to visit it as it was a fishing camp, and we had another little girl with us, and we went over there—we weren’t supposed to, but we did—and found a row boat down on the front where the little... there was a cabin, and there was a row boat pulled up with one oar in it, and the three of us got in that row boat and pushed off, and none of us could swim, and we paddled out a little bit and then got scared and decided we had better paddle ourselves back real quick before we got turned over. Once we got out of the row boat, and my sister and I went up and looked in the cabin. The doors were locked, but there was a window open, so one of us, and I don’t know who it was, pushed the other one in to go in and take a look around the cabin, and we did that, and I think my sister got a bloody nose out of that deal, and so we thought we’d better get back home before our mother found out that we had disappeared. And when I think back on it now years later, we could have drowned, and she never would have known it. She didn’t know what we did. We just explored a lot, and so then—I’m sorry, they built the high school there, and there was a huge, huge oak tree outside of the front of the gym there, and that oak tree had been there, of course, since we were really little running around playing up there. That’s one of the things I remember about that, and I know I got off on the swimming pool. We loved the swimming pool. That’s where we spent all of our summers.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Kind of describe the swimming pool. How big was it? Did they have places to change clothes?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, of course. They had changing rooms for men and women, and at one time, at its biggest, the pool had a 100 meter straightaway on it, which was a long way, but then they had a lot of meets there. It was great for 100 meter swims or 400 meter swims, and my sister and I were members of the very first swim team that they had, and I couldn’t tell you what the year was, but at the time there were three girls on that team, and I don’t know how many boys. We were all in, before junior high. We were all elementary school kids, and my sister and I continued to swim until we graduated high school, on that team. It was a good team too.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the mud in Oak Ridge?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, yeah. When we came through Elza Gate in my dad’s car that first time, I remembered seeing commodes and sinks floating in mud on the right hand side as we came through Elza Gate. All that was just floating in mud, and the trailer camp had lots of mud, and I don’t remember how my mother handled it or how we handled it. I think we must have had, I don’t know, something to get to the road, maybe pieces of board or something so we wouldn’t sink in the mud.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well now, in high school, did you date much?
MRS. SEARCY: Yeah. I did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you go on your dates?
MRS. SEARCY: To the movies mostly or dancing. There was a place outside Elza Gate down there. It was a steak house, and we did that in the summer, and I don’t remember the name of it anymore, but it was a lot of fun. Everybody kind of met there at night. If you could drive a car or get a ride, that’s where we went, and sometimes we went swimming at the rock quarry, and surely you knew where that was (laughter).
MR. HUNNICUTT: You’ll have to tell me where the rock quarry was.
MRS. SEARCY: I’m not sure how to get there anymore, but we would go dancing, and then we would decide to go swimming, so then we would go home and quietly go out and get our swim suits off the back, off the line in the back yard, and I don’t remember where we would put them on. Then we went swimming at the rock quarry after that, and then we’d come in around midnight. I think I must have been in high school, or my mother wouldn’t have let me out that late.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were your parents strict parents?
MRS. SEARCY: No, well they were strict enough. They didn’t like us out after midnight, and they liked to know where we were. Except for those occasions where we snuck off and went swimming late, they pretty much knew where we were all the time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you feel safe…
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …growing up here as a child?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, absolutely I did. I did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What gave you that type of a feeling?
MRS. SEARCY: The fact that we were all closed in there for so long, and we didn’t have to lock doors, and in particular where we lived in the flat top at first, there were mounted police riding around there all night long. I guess it was military police, but they were up there all night, and when my dad wasn’t home, we weren’t afraid. I doubt seriously my mother locked the door.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did you do after you graduated from high school?
MRS. SEARCY: I worked a year at Loveman’s down in Jackson Square, and then I went to college when my other sister graduated, and we went to college the same year at Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let me ask you a little bit about Loveman’s. What was Loveman’s?
MRS. SEARCY: It was a department store. It was a nice department store for Oak Ridge at that time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And where in Jackson Square was that located?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, it was facing the football field I guess, that part of town, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What were your job duties?
MRS. SEARCY: I started out being the Easter bunny one year (laughter). That was a hot job. Yep, that was fun because little kids were fun, and for my break time I would go sit in the dressing room and put my feet up and eat chocolate jelly beans (laughter), and after that I worked downstairs in linens and gift wrapping and handbags. I just worked around the store in different departments. It was fun.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember back when nylons were very scarce?
MRS. SEARCY: No, because I was too young to be wearing them then, and I think when I was old enough to wear them I didn’t want to wear them. I was good with bobby socks and saddle oxfords.
MR. HUNNICUTT: In the Jackson Square area, what do you recall as some of the other stores?
MRS. SEARCY: Mostly the drug store on the first corner down there that’s now turned into a restaurant, and there was a place next door to that, that sold hot doughnuts that we all loved to go to, and then there was the men’s store and the movie theater and a grocery store. And, I know there was a dime store on the other side to the left of Loveman’s. That must have been McCrorey’s Five and Ten, and we used to go there and get a huge bag of animal crackers for the movies, didn’t cost more than about 15 cents.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How often did you go to the movies?
MRS. SEARCY: Every week.
MR. HUNNICUTT: There in Jackson Square?
MRS. SEARCY: At least, yeah at least once a week, we went to the Center Theater to see cops and robbers, and the Black Whip, whoever, and the news, news reels.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how much it cost to get into the theater?
MRS. SEARCY: About a dime. I thought it was a dime.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about Coca-Cola?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, they couldn’t have been more than a nickel. It was wonderful.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you think that—Let’s talk about the buses in Oak Ridge a little bit. Now you rode the buses to and from school.
MRS. SEARCY: Everywhere, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the bus fare. Was there a cost to ride the bus?
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t think initially there was in the first few years, but then they started charging about a dime to ride the bus, and I know you could get transfers from there to wherever else you needed to go, but for school, when we were at the high school, I don’t think we, I don’t remember having to pay. We may have, but I don’t remember. A lot of things escape me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you talk about transfer, how did that work?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, you got a paper transfer, and if you needed to catch the bus say from downtown you got off in town and then could transfer out to Elm Grove or to the other end of town. They gave you a paper transfer, and we may have had to do that to go to school. I don’t know, in high school. We didn’t in junior high, but we may have in high school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have an automobile at that time? Did your parents have an automobile?
MRS. SEARCY: They got a car when I was in high school, about the time I was taking driving lessons. It was a big, old Hudson Hornet, I think. It was a huge thing. It was like a boat, and my dad let me drive it downtown to the grocery store one Friday night before a ball game (sigh), and I pulled in to park it and sideswiped somebody’s Cadillac, and he almost had a stroke (chuckles). I don’t think I took the paint off the Cadillac, but anyway he took over driving home.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you take driving lessons?
MRS. SEARCY: I took it from Mr…at the high school on our lunch hour…I want to say from Mr. Naft, but I don’t think that was the name—Earl somebody. Anyway, he was a teacher at the high school, and he was our driving teacher, and one of us would sit in the back seat and eat lunch, and the other one would take a driving lesson.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember standing in lines a lot during shopping?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, yeah everybody stood in lines, and my mother would take us along so we could stand in one line, and she could stand in another if there were meat lines and lines to get soap and things like that. Yeah, we did that and had those little coupons.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Ration coupons?
MRS. SEARCY: Ration coupons, yeah. You had your little ration tickets.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, we’re spinning back a little bit. You lived—Where did you live after you, while you were going to the high school?
MRS. SEARCY: At 115 Orchard Lane. We always stayed on Orchard Lane. We just moved up, and we were on top, we were on top of the hill when we were in the flat top, and that was Cedar Hill mostly. Then we moved down to 115 Orchard Lane, which was a cemesto, a three bedroom cemesto, C house, and we lived there until I got married.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe the C house. How was it?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, when you came in our front door into the little front hall, if you turned right you went to the back of the house with one bathroom and three bedrooms, and if you turned left you went into the living room/dining area. The living room had a fireplace, a brick fireplace, and then if you turned left out of the living room you were in the kitchen and then left out of the kitchen you were in the little utility room with the big coal bin and coal furnace. Those were the days before my mother had an automatic washer and dryer, and I don’t remember where that thing went, but when we got it, it was one of those front loaders, and everybody sat around and watched it (laughter).
MR. HUNNICUTT: You didn’t put a cat in there and watch it…
MRS. SEARCY: No, I didn’t put cats...
MR. HUNNICUTT: … go around did you?
MRS. SEARCY: …in the front loader. We thought about putting the baby sister in there one time, but we didn’t.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You’ve caught me off guard on that one.
MRS. SEARCY: I’m sorry. (Laughter)
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did they…how did you get the coal? Did they deliver the coal to the houses?
MRS. SEARCY: They delivered the coal. It seemed like it came, maybe it came once a month or twice a month. I don’t remember. I don’t remember that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, let’s spin forward a little bit more about after graduation you told me you attended college and go a little further into that.
MRS. SEARCY: I didn’t like it. It was a girls’ school. My sister and I, neither one of us really liked it. I stayed out the year. She left at midyear, and I stayed and then I decided to go to work with Delta Airlines, and I thought that’s what I wanted to do because my friend did it, so she talked me into it. But, in the meantime, I came back to Oak Ridge and taught swimming at the swimming pool in the summer to make a little money and taught little kids how to swim and some older women, and I did that when I started dating Jay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you work while you were going to high school any?
MRS. SEARCY: I can’t remember. I think I worked on weekends in gift wrapping at Loveman’s while I was in high school. Yeah, that’s what I did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you remember—You talked about dropping the atomic bomb. Tell me what you remember about that when that happened?
MRS. SEARCY: You know, my parents must have been very, kind of kept that quiet because I didn’t know much about that until a little bit later. I wondered why people were jumping around in the streets, and my dad wasn’t home when we found out about it. He was at work, and I guess we thought it was wonderful.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall your father ever talking about…
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …anything about the bomb after it was announced?
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t remember that. I don’t know, but he and mother probably discussed it, but I don’t remember it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the gate opening ceremonies that happened in March of 1949 when they opened the gates? Did you attend that?
MRS. SEARCY: Well…my sister and I went down; we walked down to Jackson Square to see the parade. We did not ride our bicycles clear down to Elza Gate. Our parents probably wouldn’t have allowed that, but we did come downtown to watch the parade and saw all the people, you know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall some of the people in the parade?
MRS. SEARCY: I recall seeing the “movie stars” that were there riding through town, the guy on the horse and then our bands, the junior high band, the majorettes, and our high school band and probably Clinton’s band was there too. I don’t know, but that was a fun day. We had a good time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there a lot of people there?
MRS. SEARCY: There were a lot of people so thick you couldn’t stir them with a stick. Now that was a great time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you go to any of the other events during the gate opening?
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t think so.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever visit the Atomic Museum?
MRS. SEARCY: You know, I visited something, and I was thinking the museum wasn’t always where it is now. Was it?
MR. HUNNICUTT: No.
MRS. SEARCY: Because I thought I visited it somewhere else, but I don’t remember. I was thinking it was down near the railroad on the way to Elza Gate. There was a railroad coming up there, and I remember being down there for some big thing that opened. That was probably the opening of it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That was the first viewing…
MRS. SEARCY: Right.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …of the museum in that warehouse.
MRS. SEARCY: Ok.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Then later it moved to Jefferson Circle in the old cafeteria.
MRS. SEARCY: Right. Well, it wasn’t there, so it was down there on that railroad side somewhere near Elza Gate.
MR. HUNNICUTT: American Museum of Atomic Energy opened the same weekend the parade and gate opening ceremonies.
MRS. SEARCY: Right, and I don’t know how we got down there. Somebody must have taken us in a car.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember any other special events in Oak Ridge that you went to?
MRS. SEARCY: Yeah, I remember when Dorothy Lamour came to Oak Ridge at one time with her husband, and somebody else was with them, but I remember going to a party here somewhere in this area where they were, and I was in high school then at that point, and I think I came with my swimming coach. He invited us along, and that was kind of fun. To me she was a bigger deal than who they’d had for the opening of the gates.
MR. HUNNICUTT: This area you’re referring to Grove Center shopping area.
MRS. SEARCY: The Grove Center.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Maybe the Oak Terrace?
MRS. SEARCY: It was the Oak Terrace ballroom, yeah. Thank you for reminding me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did she do?
MRS. SEARCY: PR, I guess. She was just there for whatever for that particular weekend, and she was glamorous, and everybody enjoyed meeting her and looking at her, I guess. She was a movie star.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you meet your husband?
MRS. SEARCY: In high school. I just didn’t date him. He dated everyone I knew (laughter). I was busy dating other people, and he wasn’t tall enough yet. In high heels at his prom he asked me to dance, and I was about…he was about the same height as I was, but he was a really great dancer, so I didn’t care.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type music did you listen to in those days?
MRS. SEARCY: Bop, black music, really good black music. We went over to Chilhowee Park to watch the black kids dance when we could. We would sit up in the balconies, and they would get to dance, and I think he took me to one of those, and somebody else took me to one, and that was a great date, and we learned some good steps.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, now you’ve met your husband in high school, and you started dating.
MRS. SEARCY: We didn’t date until he was a junior in college, I think.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, when did you get married, and where did you get married?
MRS. SEARCY: We got married here in Oak Ridge at Presbyterian Church in 1956.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And where did you first live?
MRS. SEARCY: With him?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. SEARCY: Johnson City, Tennessee, and then we didn’t live long there. We moved over to Kingsport because he was working at the Kingsport Times News and going to school full-time at East Tennessee, and so we had our first child there in Kingsport in ’57 and the second one in ’58, and then we moved on down to Chattanooga and lived there 13 years.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And then from Chattanooga?
MRS. SEARCY: To New York for four years and in the Philadelphia area for 28 years.
MR. HUNNICUTT: This was due to your husband’s profession?
MRS. SEARCY: Um-hum.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you work any while you were living in these different places?
MRS. SEARCY: I worked part-time in Chattanooga at Loveman’s again, but I worked part-time while my kids were in school because I carted them around a lot back and forth to football games and things, and then when we moved to New York, I think I worked up there at JC Penney at one time for a while, and then when we moved to the Philadelphia area the boys came back down here to school, and I went to nursing school. When I turned 40, I went to nursing school and became an LPN in one year and then started working and started going back to college and taking college courses.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What is your children’s name?
MRS. SEARCY: Mike and Mark. Mike is the oldest. He is in Dandridge. Mark lives outside of Columbus, Ohio in a little town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall their dress code versus your dress code when you went through school like how different it was, or was it different?
MRS. SEARCY: Well, their dress code was, I guess, mostly Levi’s, but they were also in the polyester generation, and they wore things that they look back on now and couldn’t imagine wearing, but they wore a lot of polyester back then.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you think the Oak Ridge school system was a good, great, or…so-so?
MRS. SEARCY: Excellent school system when we were in it. Of course, we didn’t realize it until we left here and went to different schools, and then we realized what a gift we had, had, and I don’t know whether we ever told our parents how glad we were that they brought us here because, you know, you just don’t think of it, I guess, and now that they’re gone I wish that I had been able to tell them that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you ever relate your stories to your children about Oak Ridge?
MRS. SEARCY: Yeah, they get sick of it sometimes (laughter). They do, but our children did a lot of growing up here too in the summers with their grandparents and when we would come to visit, and they had really dear friends that they met and kept for life up around Cedar Hill. They spent their summers playing at Cedar Hill too, and they realize what a good town this was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I’m going to mention some points of interest in Oak Ridge, and tell me what you remember about them…The Oak Terrace.
MRS. SEARCY: Going there to dance, having a wedding reception there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about the Snow White Drive-In?
MRS. SEARCY: Around and around, lots of hamburgers and lots of chili and tamales with onions after school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about the Skyway Drive-In?
MRS. SEARCY: I didn’t get to go there very often.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now that’s a drive-in theater.
MRS. SEARCY: I know. I guess we went some, but I don’t remember going with too terribly many dates out at the Skyway.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Of course, we mentioned the swimming pool. What about bowling? Did you..?
MRS. SEARCY: Oh, yeah. My sister and I, my one sister and I, grew up at that bowling alley down in Jackson Square because we knew the Tuckers who ran it, and their daughter was a good friend of ours, and we actually set pins too but not when there were leagues going on. We set pins for one another. It was too dangerous for girls back then, but it was fun. We actually won—We had a little team that actually won a National Junior Bowling Congress something or other. We still have our little bowling balls, and I don’t know what you do with those, pass them down to your grandkids (laughter)?
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about horseback riding or anything like that?
MRS. SEARCY: I didn’t horseback ride. The only horse I ever got on ran off with me, and I fell off.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you can remember that you’d like to talk about?
MRS. SEARCY: I don’t know. I grew up in the Oak Ridge swimming pool actually. That’s where we had most of our great fun, days and nights. I worked there, and we had lots of friends there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I’ve always heard that the water was cold. Is that true?
MRS. SEARCY: Colder than blue blazes. It is just spring fed, cold water, and it didn’t bother me when I was young, but it bothers me now, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, it’s been a pleasure to interview you.
MRS. SEARCY: Thank you.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And I believe your oral history will be a tribute to the history of Oak Ridge.
MRS. SEARCY: Do you?
MR. HUNNICUTT: And I thank you very much.
MRS. SEARCY: Thank you. I appreciated it.
[End of Interview]